The Washington Post’s neologism contest winners.

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The Washington Post’s neologism contest winners.

December 2, 2019July 21, 2023 1893

I came across this today and broke up laughing. These are seriously clever! Thanks to the Washington Post. I wasn’t aware of their neologism contest, but I am now! Read and enjoy. Pass it along.

If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don’t let some idiot talk you out of it.

Stan Lee

Books aren’t written, they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.

Michael Crichton

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil, trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.

William Faulkner

Critics are people who sit on the mountaintop and look down on the battlefield. When the fighting is finished, they take it upon themselves to come down from the mountain and shoot the survivors.

Robert Altman

It always comes down to characters, and individual stories about courage.

Steven Bochco

Anecdotes don’t make good stories. Generally, I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.

Alice Munro

Editor: A person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.

Elbert Hubbard

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

Anton Chekhov

It’s an accepted fact that all writers are crazy; even the normal ones are weird.

William Goldman

You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.

Jodi Picoult

You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won’t be able to take a break from being a writer.

Stephen Leigh

I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.

John Irving

A true author, no matter the medium, is an artist with godlike knowledge of his subject, and the proof of his authorship is that his pages smack of authority.

Robert McKee

Stories are never too long or too short. They’re too interesting or too boring.

William Shawn

Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender. But spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round.

Sherman Reilly Duffy

The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordinary qualities.

Raymond Chandler

The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.

George Bernard Shaw

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.

Orson Scott Card

Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.